Servitization in the Era of Blockchain: The Ice Cream Supply Chain Business Case

In the last years, the servitization is emerging as a new business model in the manufacturing sector, pushed by its promises of allowing to pay machines based on their actual use. Servitization is based on the recording of important events related to machine usage, such as the type and time of used tools and the type of materials processed. However, actors involved in the servitization should either trust one each other or rely on a third-party authority to store machine usage statistics in a secure and non-repudiable manner. The paper presents a novel solution adopting Blockchain in the ice cream market to leverage the servitization of ice cream machines, involving machine manufacturers, ice cream refill producers, and ice cream makers. The proposed solution exploits the amount of used refills as the metric of machine usage and ensures that involved actors are aware of every refill procedure. In addition, it ensures the privacy of business-relevant information, e.g., by avoiding that two refill producers are reciprocally aware of the amount of sold refills. While targeting the ice cream supply chain, our solution may represent a reference model for servitization even for other market sectors. Finally, performance results based on a working prototype demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution even on resource constrained devices.